Yeah, I think I could have gotten behind the telepod. would we have abbreviated it as "phone" still, or just gone with "pod"? Apple could have played some copyright games with Googleif they'd tried to release a competing pod (kind of like they tried to do with the word "podcast"...)

serial_crusher:Yeah, I think I could have gotten behind the telepod. would we have abbreviated it as "phone" still, or just gone with "pod"? Apple could have played some copyright games with Googleif they'd tried to release a competing pod (kind of like they tried to do with the word "podcast"...)

I don't know anyone who called their iPhone a "phone" they are always very insistent on saying the brand name because their entire identity is made up of the brands they own.

I wish they'd move away from the whole "phone" terminology. They're computers. That they have telephone capability is one tiny fraction of what they can do. So give it a cool, futuristic sounding name like you'd find in an Arthur C. Clarke novel.

Product names are strange. No matter how funny they might sound at first once you get used to them they lose their original connotation. Apple could gave called it the Cockmaster and we'd all think it nothing odd now no matter how much we'd have laughed for the first week or so.

Bullseyed:serial_crusher: Yeah, I think I could have gotten behind the telepod. would we have abbreviated it as "phone" still, or just gone with "pod"? Apple could have played some copyright games with Googleif they'd tried to release a competing pod (kind of like they tried to do with the word "podcast"...)

I don't know anyone who called their iPhone a "phone" they are always very insistent on saying the brand name because their entire identity is made up of the brands they own.

The brand name caught on because, in 2007, it was a novel, category-defining product. Time magazine's "Invention of the Year". Anyone who wasn't saying iPhone was going out of their way to avoid saying it.

Flint Ironstag:Product names are strange. No matter how funny they might sound at first once you get used to them they lose their original connotation. Apple could gave called it the Cockmaster and we'd all think it nothing odd now no matter how much we'd have laughed for the first week or so.

Pretty much. The original 'i' in iMac was supposed to stand for 'Internet' because that was a big deal in 1998 that a computer would have a built in modem. But then the 'i' took off and they attached it to everything even if it didn't have internet connectivity, and long after the internet ceased to be a new exciting thing.

Dissociater:The original 'i' in iMac was supposed to stand for 'Internet' because that was a big deal in 1998 that a computer would have a built in modem.

I don't know if the "i" was supposed to mean internet, but I can guaran-dam-tee you that it was very much NOT a big deal in 1998 to have an internal modem. Most everything in that day had an internal modem already... it wasn't even the first Mac to have an internal modem. Notebook PCs and Macs had internal modems. The Mac Performas had internal modems (my own 5215, purchased in 1995, had an internal modem). Externals were still available and plentiful, but by then most every computer had an internal modem at that point.

I know 1998 seems like it was when fast internet speeds were unthinkable, AOL was still relevant, and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, but we'd been doing dial up internet for the last several years at that point and BBSes for even longer.

akula:Dissociater: The original 'i' in iMac was supposed to stand for 'Internet' because that was a big deal in 1998 that a computer would have a built in modem.

I don't know if the "i" was supposed to mean internet, but I can guaran-dam-tee you that it was very much NOT a big deal in 1998 to have an internal modem. Most everything in that day had an internal modem already... it wasn't even the first Mac to have an internal modem. Notebook PCs and Macs had internal modems. The Mac Performas had internal modems (my own 5215, purchased in 1995, had an internal modem). Externals were still available and plentiful, but by then most every computer had an internal modem at that point.

I know 1998 seems like it was when fast internet speeds were unthinkable, AOL was still relevant, and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, but we'd been doing dial up internet for the last several years at that point and BBSes for even longer.

If you count Q-Link and BBSes, I've been online (using this handle!) since 1985. In the early 90s I was all over Usenet (man, that was a crazy, wild wild west scene). I ran my own BBS in the late 80s, and I played my first legitimate MMORPGs in 1991 (AOL's Neverwinter Nights Gold Box game).

My first modem was a 150-baud cradle modem. Later, I managed to upgrade to 300-baud! Woooo!

But yeah, we've been online for a while in this country. It may not have been the World Wide Web we now know, but it was definitely not unusual for computers to have modems built-in by the time the iMac came around.

I think the point Apple wanted to make, though, is that it was one of the first computers that made getting online easy for non-techie folks. It had Netscape pre-installed (I think) and required little in the way of setup or hardware connections, as opposed to IBM PCs and earlier computers that required a little tweaking to get to the Internet.

Anyway, to get back on topic: I think Apple should change the 'i' in all their product names to a '$', because that would be closer to the truth.

$Phone$Pod$Pad$Mac

/I like my iPod touch. I liked my Android phone. I like my Android tablet. I like my PC.//I won't go back to Mac, though. I see too much control from Apple there.

It's not NEARLY as ridiculous as the whole Android naming conventions. I don't care who you are, or how amazing the technology is, "Ice Cream Sandwich" and the like are absolutely retarded. Same as the whole "Lion," "Leopard," "Snow Leopard," etc for Mac OS X. It says nothing about what it's supposed to do (even "3G and 4G LTE" at least tell you which one is newer).

Fish_Bulb:It's not NEARLY as ridiculous as the whole Android naming conventions. I don't care who you are, or how amazing the technology is, "Ice Cream Sandwich" and the like are absolutely retarded. Same as the whole "Lion," "Leopard," "Snow Leopard," etc for Mac OS X. It says nothing about what it's supposed to do (even "3G and 4G LTE" at least tell you which one is newer).